Despite its popularity, DevOps methodology doesn’t cover security, which is why DevSecOps has taken the world by storm. And even though it’s platform-agnostic by nature, every major service provider offers DevSecOps services in their own unique flavors. AWS is no exception and has a host of features designed to quickly and effectively bring security into your infrastructure.
In this article, we’ll demystify AWS DevSecOps so that you can make the most of it. Read on to learn why it’s important to adopt; how AWS native services help DevSecOps thrive; and, most importantly, how to combine AWS with DevSecOps best practices for resilient, secure, and reliable infrastructure.
Secure Coding Best Practices [Cheat Sheet]
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What is AWS DevSecOps?
The DevSecOps methodology is an extension of foundational DevOps practices that focuses on securing the entire software development lifecycle. By making secure development the primary objective instead of an afterthought, DevSecOps encourages you to integrate security into every stage of your workflow, from design through deployment and runtime.
In essence, AWS DevSecOps is a method of applying DevSecOps that’s tailored to the specific nature of AWS as your cloud provider. It promotes integrating the core DevSecOps principles—such as shifting security left, focusing on automation, implementing proactive defense, and leveraging continuous monitoring—through native AWS services.
Why AWS DevSecOps matters for cloud security
It doesn’t matter who your cloud provider is: When it comes to cloud computing at scale, security is an essential part of the long-term success of your business. Robust security is a tall order, though.
At enterprise scale, workloads become less and less manageable, obscured by their numbers and extensive structure. Legacy methods of approaching security—such as addressing concerns at the end of the development process—catch issues far too late, when they’re incredibly expensive to fix.
With DevSecOps, things look totally different:
Shifting your security left allows you to catch issues much earlier in the development cycle.
Infrastructure as code (IaC) and policy as code (PaC) provide you with reproducible, auditable infrastructure that’s simple to maintain.
Automated scanning, monitoring, and remediation maintain the day-to-day security standing of your code, making protection continuous.
TL;DR: Why does AWS DevSecOps matter? Because to date, it's the fastest, most effective, and most cost-efficient way to protect your AWS-native workflows and maintain a strong security posture.
AWS native services for DevSecOps implementation
Next, let’s talk about which AWS services will be useful on your Amazon DevSecOps journey. As the leading cloud provider on the market, AWS offers a wide range of different security tools, each with a very different use case. There’s a lot to unpack, so for clarity, we’ll group them according to their DevSecOps focus area:
| You need… | Applicable services |
|---|---|
| Resilient governance, access control, and identity federation |
|
| Deep CI/CD security integration |
|
| Secrets and configuration management |
|
| Vulnerability management, runtime security, and monitoring capabilities |
|
Governance, access control, and identity federation
AWS IAM
As its name implies, AWS Identity and Access Management is the backbone of identity management on AWS. This is your go-to for precise control over who can access your resources, in what circumstances, and how they’re allowed to interact with them. Using IAM, you can declare granular policies, allowing principals (such as services, users, or roles) to execute specific actions on your AWS resources.
AWS Organizations
Essential at scale, Organizations is a service that provides simplified management of multi-account AWS environments. Organizations lets you establish a hierarchy so that governance policies can be inherited, ensuring that the DevSecOps best practices you’ve already rolled out on the main account are automatically distributed to, and enforced on, all organization members.
AWS Control Tower
Control Tower extends Organizations: It automates some of Organizations’ features and adds some of its own too. With integrated, centralized governance and guardrails to enforce best practices on newly created accounts, Control Tower allows you to significantly speed up the process of provisioning new AWS environments without compromising on security. It also introduces self-service capabilities to democratize the resource-provisioning process, with DevSecOps best practices already implemented out of the box.
CI/CD security integration
AWS offers five CI/CD pipeline services that work together to help you implement DevSecOps practices. The key thing to remember here? All five are deeply integrated into the wider AWS ecosystem. For example, they all send their audit data to CloudTrail and rely on IAM for least-privilege RBAC and KMS for encryption at rest.
Here’s a closer look at each service:
CodePipeline: CodePipeline is responsible for orchestrating the entire workflow; it allows you to define stages and handles triggering pipelines on commits or based on a schedule.
CodeBuild: Even though its name suggests it only handles the build phase, CodeBuild is far more versatile. Besides builds/compilations, CodeBuild also enables you to run various tests, linting, static analysis, general security scanners, and more.
CodeArtifact: CodeArtifact manages software packages and dependencies (npm, Maven, PyPI, NuGet) as a private repository. Build outputs from CodeBuild—such as compiled binaries, container images, or deployment packages—are stored in Amazon S3, pushed to Amazon ECR (for containers), or deployed directly to AWS Lambda.
Signer: Signer lets you cryptographically sign your artifacts. This signature can be verified later by the deployment orchestrator, ensuring artifacts weren’t tampered with to protect against supply chain attacks and prevent unauthorized deployments.
CodeDeploy: Lastly, CodeDeploy handles the automated deployment of previously prepared artifacts. It’s capable of canary and blue/green deployments and allows rollbacks if the post-deploy health checks fail.
Secrets and configuration management
Secrets Manager
Secrets Manager offers a secure storage vault for all the secrets your application might require at build time or runtime (e.g., API tokens, credentials, and certificates). Besides simple safekeeping, it also allows you to automatically rotate secrets and version them, providing a fall-back option in case of a rotation failure. Secrets Manager integrates with IAM for fine-grained access control.
KMS
Key Management Service holds the keys to your AWS security—encryption keys, that is. AWS Key Management Service (KMS) lets you create, rotate, and delete customer managed keys. KMS also supports importing your own key material into a KMS key to fulfill regulatory requirements for key custody or to meet compliance frameworks requiring customer-controlled encryption keys.
Systems Manager Parameter Store
Looking for an alternative to Secrets Manager for configuration data that isn’t necessarily highly sensitive or in need of automatic rotation, but still doesn’t belong in the wider codebase? Parameter Store has you covered.
Parameter Store restricts access through IAM policies, allows configuration versioning, and lets you make changes without redeployment. Access is logged and auditable, which helps satisfy regulatory compliance requirements.
Vulnerability management, runtime security, and monitoring
CloudWatch
This service is the core of observability in AWS. CloudWatch…
Aggregates logs, metrics, and events from native and custom services
Lets you query collected data for useful information
Presents query results in easy-to-understand dashboards
CloudWatch Alarms trigger automation based on metric thresholds. To detect security events like failed login attempts, first create a CloudWatch Logs metric filter that counts specific log patterns (e.g., failed authentication events). Then configure a CloudWatch Alarm on that metric to invoke an AWS Lambda function when the threshold is exceeded. This Lambda function can automatically update AWS WAF rules to block the attacker's IP or alert your security team.
CloudTrail
AWS CloudTrail serves as your primary audit log. When configured as a multi-region trail with data event logging enabled, CloudTrail records management plane API calls (resource creation, modification, deletion) and data plane operations (S3 object access, Lambda function invocations) across your AWS account, providing a complete audit trail for security investigations and compliance.
GuardDuty
GuardDuty is an intelligent threat detection service, monitoring your workloads for signs of suspicious or malicious activity. GuardDuty integrates well with most of the AWS ecosystem—including databases, containers, instances, and serverless functions—and allows automated preventive actions and remediation.
Inspector
AWS Inspector facilitates automated security assessments and vulnerability management in real time. Amazon Inspector continuously assesses EC2 instances, ECR container images, and Lambda functions after deployment, identifying vulnerabilities in software components and dependencies. To preemptively gate builds, configure ECR scan-on-push to evaluate images before deployment, or add CodeBuild test stages that fail the pipeline when critical vulnerabilities are detected. Combine Inspector's post-deploy findings with pre-deploy checks for comprehensive coverage.
Amazon Inspector continuously scans EC2 instances, Amazon ECR container images, and AWS Lambda functions for software vulnerabilities (CVEs) and unintended network exposure. Inspector produces findings with CVE identifiers, CVSS scores, affected packages, and remediation guidance to help teams prioritize patches based on exploitability and asset criticality.
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Common challenges in AWS DevSecOps
Implementing DevSecOps might be a huge shock to unprepared teams, especially if you’re trying to change too much, too fast. A better bet? Gradually introduce tools and technologies to help your team naturally pivot, instead of suddenly shifting everything.
The same goes for setting benchmarks and goals. DevSecOps aims for a good balance between development speed and robust security posture, but striking that balance might be hard for fresh adopters. Start with smaller goals, and gradually improve your practices as the culture grows. This approach allows your team to become more comfortable and attuned to the security-first approach at a natural speed.
Finally, you might stumble upon knowledge gaps, which is normal for any significant change. Luckily, as one of the biggest cloud service providers, AWS maintains thorough documentation of its concepts, services, and tools. Although not everyone has to be an expert, taking a bit of time to develop a baseline understanding of the tools you deploy (or even springing for AWS DevSecOps certification) helps your team get invested in DevSecOps adoption.
Best practices for AWS DevSecOps
Now, it’s time to get into best practices. Following them is the key to smooth, successful DevSecOps adoption throughout your AWS environments.
Pro-tip: To keep your security posture ironclad, make sure to periodically re-check that you’re still aligned with this list.
Emphasize preventive action
Prevention is much easier and cheaper than addressing issues after they become incidents. That’s why you’ll want to follow these preventive measures to make sure things can’t get out of control:
IAM policies
AWS Organizations service control policies (SCPs)
Control Tower guardrails
Service quotas
S3 “Block Public Access” defaults
EBS default encryption
Mandatory IMDSv2
Keep in mind that even though these preventive measures are incredibly effective, they won’t help if they’re circumvented. Unified policy enforcement from IDE/CI through runtime is your best shot against misconfigurations, vulnerable deployments, and human errors. Choose a single, comprehensive policy-as-code framework, and commit to it end to end in order to block risky changes both at their source (IaC, secrets, dependencies) and in pipelines.
Automate protecting your cloud
Security and automation always go together; it’s a natural fit. The AWS ecosystem provides many useful integrations between its services—use them wisely, and aim for continuous safety without manual involvement:
Make use of automatic quality gating and AWS Inspector integration in CodePipeline CI/CD to make sure only safe code gets through.
Integrate more SCA/SAST/IaC scanning in CodeBuild stages to spot misconfigurations or vulnerable provisioning orders and nip them in the bud.
To keep your container images safe from current and emerging vulnerabilities, enforce automatic AWS ECR security scans.
Configure GuardDuty, CloudWatch, and CloudTrail to leverage their integration with Lambda for immediate, hands-off incident response and vulnerability mitigation.
Democratize security ownership
In DevSecOps, security is everyone’s concern, so make sure you’re empowering teams to take matters into their own hands.
Educate your teams about security considerations, emphasizing the importance of collaboration, thorough reviews, and quality gates for the safety and reliability of the end product. Another great way to promote responsibility and accountability? Use role-based views and ownership mapping to route fixes to the right teams automatically (e.g., owners of repos, pipelines, and services).
Keep your priorities sharp
Some risks aren’t severe on their own, but when they’re paired with other risks in just the right combination, they become toxic. For example, internet exposure might not directly translate to an incident—until it’s combined with an unpatched, exploitable vulnerability. Then it’s only a matter of time before disaster strikes. Fight back against toxic combinations by refining your detection tools to seek out dangerous patterns and trigger immediate automated remediation when they turn up.
Meilleures pratiques de sécurité AWS : guide complet en dix étapes pour renforcer votre sécurité cloud
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Compliance and AWS DevSecOps: Framework mapping
AWS DevSecOps practices align with major compliance frameworks:
| Framework | Key controls | AWS services | DevSecOps practice |
|---|---|---|---|
| CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark | Secure configurations, logging, monitoring | AWS Config conformance packs, CloudTrail, GuardDuty | Enforce CIS Benchmarks via Config rules; detect drift with continuous monitoring |
| ISO 27001 | Information security management, access control | AWS Audit Manager, IAM Access Analyzer, Security Hub | Automate evidence collection; enforce least privilege via IAM policies and SCPs |
| SOC 2 | Security, availability, confidentiality | CloudTrail, Config, Security Hub, S3 (audit logs) | Maintain immutable audit trails; aggregate findings in Security Hub for reporting |
| PCI DSS | Network segmentation, encryption, logging | VPC, KMS, CloudTrail, Config | Enforce encryption at rest/transit; validate network isolation via IaC policies |
| NIST Cybersecurity Framework | Identify, protect, detect, respond, recover | Security Hub, Inspector, GuardDuty, Systems Manager | Continuous vulnerability assessment; automated incident response via Lambda |
Compliance audit checklist:
Export AWS Config snapshots monthly for configuration evidence.
Generate Inspector SBOMs (software bills of materials) for vulnerability tracking.
Review Security Hub compliance scores against CIS/PCI benchmarks.
Validate IaC templates against OPA/Conftest policies before deployment.
Archive CloudTrail logs in S3 with lifecycle policies for retention requirements.
This mapping helps teams demonstrate how DevSecOps practices satisfy auditor requirements.
Measuring ROI and DevSecOps effectiveness
The safety of your AWS environments correlates directly to customer satisfaction and trust, the foundational aspects of business growth. That said, “satisfaction” and “trust” aren’t the best ways to quantify the true value of your efforts for stakeholders.
Instead, use these key metrics to explain how DevSecOps adoption impacts your business:
MTTD and MTTR: Mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to remediate (MTTR) showcase the true power of the shift-left approach. Once security becomes an integral part of every step of your SDLC, vulnerabilities are identified much faster. And when issues are found before they spiral out of control, remediation time also improves.
False positives / false negatives: After implementing DevSecOps, don’t take a spike in security findings the wrong way. If you’re turning up lots of issues, it doesn’t necessarily mean that more security flaws are finding their way into your environments. Track the total number of findings along with false positives/negatives, and it’s likely you’ll see that more previously undetected threats are getting caught right away.
MTTR for prioritized, contextual attack paths: In contrast with raw alert volume, this metric truly shows how your new security focus translates to mitigating real, specific threats.
Percentage of findings with code owner identified: This metric showcases that your team is shifting away from a traditional security approach to make security a priority for every developer and engineer.
Future trends in AWS DevSecOps
We’ve taken an in-depth look at the state of modern DevSecOps—but as with everything in the cloud, rapid change is on the horizon. Here are our predictions about what comes next, based on AWS announcements and industry forecasts.
First up? AI. Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence are poised to significantly impact security practices. For its part, AWS is investing in deepening the integration between AI/ML and its native security tools. As a result, insiders predict that services like GuardDuty, Audit Manager, and Inspector will continue to roll out useful features and enhanced automation capabilities.
Zero trust is another trend that’s gaining momentum. As the industry shifts towards granular access controls applied to every user, service, and system without implicit trust, it’s safe to say that AWS IAM Identity Center and AWS Verified Access will see changes. IAM Identity Center will likely extend its already pivotal role, while AWS Verified Access is set to slowly replace the VPNs that were traditionally used to securely access internal environments. Signed artifacts, ECR attestations, and SLSA-aligned CI/CD pipelines are also becoming the new standard, catering to the spike in demand for provenance and visibility into the software supply chain.
Lastly, any look at future trends would be incomplete without a discussion about compliance. Achieving and maintaining compliance with industry compliance frameworks is mandatory for many businesses, and new rules and laws come into force fast. That’s why simplified compliance solutions will definitely grow to address those needs with the help of AI and automation.
How Wiz enables comprehensive AWS DevSecOps
If you remember one thing from this article, it should be this: DevSecOps rests on full code-to-cloud visibility. After all, it’s impossible to integrate security into every stage of the software development lifecycle if you can’t see what’s in play.
While traditional solutions miss the mark, creating gaps in coverage and increasing complexity in the process, unified visibility is where Wiz shines.
Here’s what sets Wiz apart:
Agentless onboarding across AWS accounts: By eliminating the overhead of agent-based solutions, Wiz allows you to quickly and effortlessly improve the security posture of your organization, big or small.
Unified scanning: Wiz's unified policy engine scans for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, identity risks, data exposure, secrets, and runtime threats—then correlates these findings in the Wiz Security Graph. This graph-based correlation identifies real attack paths by connecting related risks (such as an internet-exposed server with an exploitable vulnerability and access to sensitive data), enabling teams to prioritize the toxic combinations that pose actual business risk.
Code-to-cloud and cloud-to-code analysis and remediation: To make separate, lengthy security reviews a thing of the past, Wiz empowers developers to fix issues right at their source.
Full context: Wiz combines scanning results, infrastructure-as-code validation, secrets detection, and software composition analysis with runtime context from cloud environments into the Wiz Security Graph. With key context in this at-a-glance graph, it’s easy to prioritize the most critical risks.
Wiz’s platform complements AWS native services by providing deeper code-to-cloud correlation and developer-friendly remediation workflows that traditional security tools simply can’t match.
Ready to learn more about how Wiz can help your AWS organization adopt DevSecOps? Explore our demo today.
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